I’ve recently noticed many companies have been falling victim to repeated outages—outages that leave disgruntled customers and lost revenue in its wake. This raises an important question: Is downtime really just a part of doing business? When it comes to the mission-critical applications that dictate the survivability of a business, the answer should be a resounding “no”.

Not all publicity is good publicity especially when service disruptions are the topic. Imagine the impact of having a key database or service unavailable—for hours or days— and the impact that would have on your business. During 2012 this became a startling reality for many companies— a reality that ended up costing, on average, $181,770 per hour of downtime.[1] These risks will continue to be a growing concern as businesses increasingly adopt x86 systems for their mission-critical workloads without having an adequate high availability solution in place.

In the December 2012 release of HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux, HP introduced many new capabilities that further fortified Linux to protect you from unexpected downtime:

HP Serviceguard Disaster Recovery Solutions for Linux—provides failover recovery after an outage in less than 2 minutes, regardless of the distance.[2] With Serviceguard/Linux Disaster Recovery, customers can withstand the loss of a data center and maintain access to critical data and applications without impacting performance.

Support for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES)—in addition to the current support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Support for all HP ProLiant Gen8 and G7 Rack Mount (DL) Servers and BladeSystems (BL)

As you rely on x86/Linux infrastructures to run more of your critical workloads, the reliability you are currently accustomed to will not be enough in a competitive environment where compute uptime is critical to survive. While we all know downtime can happen in any IT environment, the goal is to make your IT operations as seamless as possible so your customers never have to worry about it. HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux makes this possible every day, with capabilities such as built-in resiliency, dynamic reconfiguration, as well as immediate and transparent recovery from outages. This means fluid operations and happy customers. To learn more about how you can protect your x86/Linux environment, visit HP Serviceguard Solutions for Linux and/or hear our HP expert discuss the latest updates.

[1] Datacenter Downtime: How Much Does It Really Cost?, Aberdeen Group, March 2012

[2] Based on HP Lab analysis that showed failover recovery in less than 2 minutes for any distance when using an HP ProLiant DL380 G7 server (2 Intel® Xeon® processors, 4 computing cores each) with Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 6.2 running HP Serviceguard for Linux 11.20.10. Configuration dependent excluding cluster reformation time. This is also assuming good bandwidth so that the data replication lag is less than 2 minutes (only in the case of Asynchronous replication).